Andre Kertesz (1894 - 1985)

At the end of the documentary I was left with two major sentiments, the first to never take pictures to please your critics and second that the perspective of your critics or your audience will always be a subjective one.

As the world looks back on the collective portfolio of Andre Kertesz it is apparent that he was immensely talented, but hugely undervalued in the prime of his life.
The documentary showed a man, saddened and beaten and perhaps even a little bitter over the efforts of his former critics to reach out to him in later life with awards for his lifetime of work. Given that the most successful period of his work was during the 1930’s in Paris, it would seem the accolades that began to mount during the seventies - came too late.

Born a Hungarian Jew, Kertesz fled to New York in 1936 in an effort to escape Anti-Semitic persecution in Europe. The acclaim that he had earned in Hungary and France quickly whittled away by American critics who found his work overly sentimental and his use of angles, unconventional – the very trademarks that made him successful. At the prime of his career, Kertesz the man who ‘wrote stories with light’ was reduced to a catalogue photographer for Garden and Home magazine.

At the same period in New York, however, photographers were producing sentimental and humanistic work all the time and being praised for it. Consider Hal Morey’s 1930 ‘Sun beams into Grand Central Station’ and Charles C Ebbett’s 1932 “Lunchtime atop a skyscraper” – which both could easily have been mistaken for Kertesz, imitating his composition, symmetry and contrast. It is difficult to know whether photography was shared across the Atlantic during the thirties, and which photographer may have set the precedent, but there certainly was a prolific volume of work produced from Paris, London and New York representing sentimental portraits of everyday life in the Kertesz Style.

His last published works of the glass bust really seal the tragedy of his life. Heartbroken over the loss of his wife and now living like a recluse in his New York Apartment, Kertesz captures the small glass sculpture in different light and perspective. Devoid of human characteristics, so vital a component to his former work, Kertesz’s last chapter appears to mock the establishment who are now willing to bestow all manner of awards on him regardless of his subject.